Newsweek's 'gay president' cover was unfair to Pennsylvania

TOWN SQUARE

A photograph of James Buchanan with a halo could not be located, but he, not… (Contributed Photo )

May 17, 2012|Paul Carpenter

Pennsylvanians have justification for being upset over this week's Newsweek magazine cover, portraying President Barack Obama as "the first gay president."

That had to do with Obama's decision to come out, excuse the expression, in favor of same-sex marriages. The cover, in turn, probably reflected a compelling need by Newsweek not to be outdone by its chief competitor when it comes to salacious splashes. (The whole country was buzzing over Time magazine's cover, showing a boy — identified as a 3-year-old but appearing older — standing on a little chair to be breast-fed by his very comely mother.)

Residents of the Keystone State do not seem especially upset over the salaciousness of either magazine, as far as I can tell, but I should not be the least bit surprised if many are asking about our contribution to the presidency, James Buchanan.

For Newsweek to say Obama is the first gay president is like saying that Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan (not Charles Lindbergh) was the first to fly across the Atlantic solo. What was Buchanan? Chopped liver?

In connection with our last two Presidents Day observances, I focused on the only Pennsylvania native sent to the White House. Buchanan served from 1857 to 1861 and, in last year's column, I noted there were "rumors about his sexual orientation."

Until recent decades, however, Americans did not get hysterical over sexual issues that involved what consenting adults did in private. In 1856, they were more concerned about Buchanan's position on slavery and other issues that led to the Civil War, and some historians called him the worst president ever. (That, of course, was before George W. Bush came along.)

This week, in George Mason University's "History News Network," historian Jim Loewen was categorical about Buchanan's pioneering presidential sexuality. He called the Newsweek cover "cheap sensationalism" and said "the U.S. already had a gay president more than a century ago. There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay. ... Moreover, the nation knew it, too."

Loewen said that after Buchanan's "great love," William Rufus King, left to serve as ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote a letter complaining of his loneliness, "having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them."

Today, some people are more concerned about sex than anything else. Conservative Republicans, for example, pretend to focus on economic matters, but go rabid if anybody mentions President Clinton, who presided over better fiscal performance than any president since Eisenhower. It was only Clinton's nonmarital sex in the White House that horrified the GOP.

Some of the best leaders in our history — from Benjamin Franklin, to Thomas Jefferson, to Eisenhower (probably) — strayed sexually. Meanwhile, some of the worst, especially in recent history, were rigidly devoted to heterosexual monogamy. They included Bush and Richard Nixon.

Meanwhile, the best shot Pennsylvania has had at the White House in recent decades has been (egad) the sanctimonious Rick Santorum, who wants to turn America into a Judeo-Christian theocracy. I bet there never will be a Newsweek cover depicting Santorum with a rainbow-colored halo because of his support for same-sex marriages.

As recently as my youth, people were far more relaxed about sex, including homosexuality, than they are now.

In those days, the president of our school board, a woman, openly lived with another woman and our school doctor, a gay man, always took an inordinately long time to complete the "turn your head to the left and cough" procedure.

Nobody seemed traumatized by that. The boys in my school treated it as a big joke. We (that is, I) were far more traumatized by the repeated rejections from the gorgeous girls we lusted after.

The real hysteria in those days involved anti-communism. I once was threatened by a teacher who overheard me say something negative about Sen. Joe McCarthy, the paladin of anti-communism in the 1950s. She told me such a display of heterodoxy could cause problems for two of my aunts, who also were teachers in that school.

The fear generated by that climate was real, as were the lives it destroyed all over America with blacklists and other crusades against free speech and thought.

Other hysterias have included witchcraft, Three Mile Island, Islam in general (as opposed to the nuts who engaged in actual terrorism) and xenophobia. (The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party officially defines "illegal alien" as anybody who speaks Spanish and is willing to work harder than "real" Americans.)

Now, we have a new bugaboo. The same kinds of people who once loved McCarthyism have shifted their wrath to same-sex marriage, as if that will somehow threaten the righteous, or their bank accounts.

Newsweek's false claim that Obama is the first gay president (ignoring our guy) should energize the pride and the political passions of Pennsylvanians. Maybe we can come up with a gay pro-communist Spanish-speaking Muslim candidate who is a devotee of Wicca.